Projects

A selection of scripts, programs and other useful things. Unless otherwise mentioned everything here is my own work that I’ve done specifically to make my life easier. If you find it’s made your life easier as well I’d love to hear about it either in the comments here or by email.

All of my original code is available under the GNU GPL, as that seems to be the easiest solution in terms of code reuse. Insofar as it is possible I am also amenable to releasing code under a more permissive license if you contact me. Also, I spend most of my time doing research and writing various bits of code to assist in that endeavor. I am not a licensing guru, if you are or have suggestions/comments about the (in)appropriateness of various open source licenses I would love to hear your advice, anecdotes or concerns.

Packages & Programs

phpExp – A user friendly(ish) php script designed to allow you to rapidly and easily deploy web-based experiments. I wrote it, I don’t exactly support it, but you’re welcome to email me with your praise/suggestion/frustration/rage. [ BitBucket ]

peyetools – A python package designed to simplify common tasks involving eye-tracking time-series. Specifically designed to manipulate sample reports of the type generated by SR Research’s DataViewer, however in principle the tools should work on any tab-delimited sample report with similar structure. This package is constantly growing as my needs change. If you find it useful, or have feature requests do let me know. [ BitBucket ]

Online Tools

Edit Distance Calculator – A simple tool I built for calculating levenshtein distance. You input comma separated word pairs, one pair on each line, and it tells you the edit distance between the two words in the pair (i.e. how many deletions, substitutions and/or additions are required to change one word into the other). This is useful for all kinds of things, but was built primarily for comparing orthographic and phonetic distance for psycholinguistic stimuli creation. Code is available on [ BitBucket ]

Work In Progress

Categorical Perception Database – Categorical perception is an extremely interesting cognitive phenomenon, which you can read about here. I’m in the final stages of building an online categorical perception experiment portal and database along with my fellow web coder Kristen Peterson, and the Boise State Linguistics Laboratory. I am going to try to make the code available, but it depends on the permission of the client. You can check out the current state of things now though (you have to imagine the audio playing, as I am still waiting on the audio stimuli).

Twentiment – A simple twitter sentiment analyzer and naive Bayesian classifier trainer. The web interface is under construction, but basically you input a search term (e.g. ‘United Airlines’) and pulls a set of recent tweets, automatically classifies them as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ and then gives you a score (e.g. people are generally negative toward the search term). It isn’t perfect (and is still pretty early alpha) but it’s clocking in around 85% accurate on internal tests, which is pretty amazing considering how simple the AI is. The code itself is primarily a trainer, which needs to be trained on a large corpus of hand-labled tweets. Unfortunately, I can’t actually post the training data, due to the twitter terms of service, so your milage may vary. In any case you can get the code on [ BitBucket ]

Rapid – Early stages of a simple speed-run game concept. I am primarily experimenting with python and pygame as a graphics engine, and with game development in general. Code is on [ BitBucket ]